On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 15:40:01 -0500 Bill Barry <[email protected]> dijo:
>For your use case it might be ok to take the heat sinks off the SSD >drives. If you are only using them for short 10 or 15 minute bursts >then an external fan should work just fine to keep them cool. The heat >sinks are useful if you are using the SSD for long periods of time. At this time what I want to do may not be possible. The problem is not the NVMe drives, rather, there exist no Thunderbolt 3 enclosures that can hold the capacity that I need. There is a 4-bay enclosure from Netstor, but that means I must populate it with 8TB M.2 drives, and the only ones on the market at this time are from Sabrent. The Sabrent drives require a very tall heat sink (0.9 inches), and the Netstor case has only 0.64 inch clearance. The heat sinks on the Sabrent drives are removable, but that sounds like a Really Bad Idea. The only other case on the market for M.2 drives is a 4-bay from OWC, but they won't certify it with drives over 4TB. There are a couple other vendors who have recently come out with 8TB M.2 drives, but they are wider and longer than 22mm x 80mm, so they won't fit in either enclosure. Plus, I am not wild about the Sabrent drives anyway, as they use QLC instead of TLC. QLC is cheaper, but at the expense of lifespan. There is a different approach - use a Thunderbolt 3 case for PCIe cards and populate it with three such cards that can take 4 NVMe drives each, putting 12 2TB M.2 drives on them. But then there is the problem of not enough lanes, slowing down the throughput. And there may still be a clearance problem for heat sinks, although with 2TB drives I have lots more choices. Another possibility is to ditch the M.2 connectors and use U.2 drives instead. There are a couple of 12TB U.2 drives on the market, but they are Really Expensive and there are no Thunderbolt 3 enclosures on the market that can take more than one. It appears that U.2 connectors may eventually replace M.2 connectors, but it will be at least a couple of years before that even starts to happen. An advantage of U.2 is that the drives commonly connect with a cable, much like SATA drives in a desktop computer, so there are more options for location. I haven't completely given up. My existing WD red drives are over three years old, so I'm motivated to replace them. I could just buy a couple spinning disks for replacements, but I was hoping that I could eliminate the speed issue. _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
